


right place, wrong time

by alderations



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Chases, Heist, Jealousy, Multi, Paralysis, Peter's just a lil bit protective when people threaten his bf yknow, Poisoning, creepy robots, tags will be updated as this goes on
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-01-13 02:53:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18459977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: As if anything about this job could conceivably get any worse, the hand pointing the gun at her belonged to none other than one Juno Steel, Private Eye, mouth hanging open and face turning red faster than she had previously thought possible.--Alessandra Strong has survived a lot of things, but "accidentally getting hired to stop your friend and his crime-family from robbing a bank" isn't one of them. Yet.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm taking a stab at a (short) chaptered fic to Hold Myself Accountable and whatnot, and also cuz this is... going places >:3c. I just couldn't get this idea out of my head. I Want More Alessandra. I wanna watch Juno and Peter be gay dumbasses in SPACE. I wanna know literally everything there is to know about Vespa, too. (And Buddy and Jet but I haven't had the chance to describe them in excruciating detail yet. It's coming.)
> 
> Your comments & kudos keep me truckin'. Metaphorically. Also literally, since I spend a lot of time in my truck, but that's neither here nor there.
> 
> ~~also, working title for this was "Juno Steel: Top Magnet Strikes Again"~~

Alessandra Strong was having, all things considered, a shitty day.

At the moment, she blamed the man struggling in her grip, his face contorted with frustration that didn’t sit right on his polished features. He was tall, almost as big as her, and soft around the middle; what he lacked in physical strength, he made up for with slippery tenacity that kept Alessandra on her toes. Any other day, she would’ve enjoyed the challenge. The guy reminded her a bit of Steel, actually. But this job had already gone wrong in a dozen ways, and she only had so much patience for self-assured thieves who couldn’t fathom being caught.

Just when he looked like he was about to start biting—and with teeth like those, Alessandra would rather avoid that—she brought the heel of her boot down on his instep, hard, until he yelped and went slack in her grip. Of course that was another calculated ploy, and she relaxed with him just until he tried to worm away, only to be caught with one arm around his neck and another pinning his wrists in place. “You’re—you’re good,” he wheezed, still trying to kick her. “How much do you charge?”

“Ten years’ jail time, minimum,” Alessandra deadpanned.

His laugh was theatrical enough to make her uncomfortable, especially considering that she had a firm grasp on his windpipe. “Most PI’s can be bought for the right kind of pay, in my modest exper— _ ieugh.”  _ He cut off as Alessandra squeezed her elbow tighter and forced him to choose between sweet-talking and staying conscious.

“Clearly you’re not working with the right kind of PI, then.” Whatever scathing retort he was formulating, it wouldn’t make it past his lips anyway, so she barreled on. “Who  _ are _ you working with? And stop squirming, you’re acting like a cheap cat burglar.”

That offended him, to her satisfaction. She could see the calculating gleam in his eyes as he stopped struggling, so she kept pushing him toward the doors of the vault before he could get the chance to muster a new escape plan. All of two minutes ago, Alessandra had caught the thief with his nimble fingers extracting a data drive from the massive shelves at the back of the vault, so focused on his task that he hardly noticed her approach. She’d taken the drive from him and zipped it into a pocket inside her jacket—that part hadn’t been easy, with a writhing thief in her grip, but she learned her lesson about outer pockets on the Saffron case. Thankfully, this guy didn’t seem keen on kissing her any time soon.

The doors slid open easily when Alessandra elbowed the control panel, which she noted for later, when she would tear her client a new one about their esoteric security measures. As soon as she stepped through, dragging the thief with her, she saw the barrel of a blaster aimed at her from across the room. Predictable. Despite his considerable size, she swung the thief around in front of her without much trouble and braced herself against the door once it closed. “If you shoot me, I’ll choke your thief out,” she growled. She wouldn’t kill him, and anyone who knew her could hear that in her voice, but that wasn’t a problem now, a dozen planets away from Mars fighting some backwater bank robbers.

Until she realized, with all the force of a speeding train, that it was very much a problem. As if anything about this job could conceivably get  _ any _ worse, the hand pointing the gun at her belonged to none other than one Juno Steel, Private Eye, mouth hanging open and face turning red faster than she had previously thought possible. Her captive had started to fight back again, emboldened by Juno’s presence.  _ There goes any chance that we’re both after the same mark,  _ she mused, confusion turning to fury.

“Juno,” the man squeaked with what little air he could muster. “Juno, thank goodness, everything will go just fine if we can only—”

“Would you like to explain,” Alessandra cut him off through gritted teeth, “what the hell you’re doing here, Steel?”

The room dropped into stone-cold silence. Alessandra had seen Juno in a lot of situations, most of them compromising, but the color on his face was something entirely new. Under her forearm, the thief had gone still, no longer lifting a finger as the moment stretched from uncomfortable to miserable. By the time Juno moved again, her grip had loosened so much that the thief could probably wriggle free without issue, but he was courteous enough to wait while Juno gawked.

He finally pulled himself together, throat clicking audibly as he swallowed. “Alessandra. I—I don’t have time to explain, uhm, anything right now, so if you’d be so kind as to—”

“No.” She cut him off again before he could start sputtering in outrage. “I’m going to need a pretty long list of reasons why I shouldn’t shoot you  _ and  _ your compatriot, and you’d better start talking  _ now.” _

Juno’s eye flashed with a mix of fear and purpose, which meant that he was either after some earth-shattering greater good again, or he had finally learned to care about the threat of death. She couldn’t decide which was worse. “First of all, I think you’d be interested in our—in what we’re doing here. I can’t explain it in front of, y’know, cameras and all that, but just—just trust me on that, okay? And that brings me to my second point.” His voice grew louder and his words jumbled together as Alessandra tugged on the thief’s wrists, wrestling him back into submission before he could get any ideas. “You’ve gotta trust me, Alessandra. You know I wouldn’t betray you, right? We’re friends.”

“Sure,” she hissed. “We’re friends.  _ When I haven’t been hired to stop you from robbing a damn bank.” _

“You—god  _ dammit.”  _ Juno tugged at his hair with the hand not holding his gun. “Of course. Of course these fucking assholes would hire you. We had no idea how prepared they’d be for—”

“Prepared? Are you kidding me? Half the doors aren’t even locked! They have no idea what they’re doing!”

The thief pried her arm away from his throat just long enough to muster a few words. “That was me. You’re welcome,” he added.

Juno tipped his head as if to confirm what the thief said. “Look, Alessandra, we both know you can beat me in a fight if it comes to that, and apparently you can best N— _ him,  _ too. That’s, uh, new.” He swallowed visibly again, his cheeks still flushed raspberry-red. “So just—just come with us, okay? We’ll explain what we’re doing here, and if you don’t like it, you can, y’know, beat me up and leave us to be killed by all the damn booby traps. If we stay here, they’re gonna get us all either way.”

As much as she secretly enjoyed having a leg up on Juno, she knew he was right. Their stalemate was wasting time, and even Alessandra’s lackluster briefing was enough to tell just how well-armed this place was, even if it wasn’t necessarily well-secured. And she wouldn’t say it out loud, but she really did trust Juno’s moral compass. Usually. “Fine. Take your thief, then,” she bit out, dropping her arms to let the man in her grasp go, and reaching for her gun in the same motion, just to be safe.

Almost too fast to see, the thief was across the room, his solid figure wedged in front of Juno and his face contorted in a snarl. Behind him, Alessandra caught a glimpse of Juno rolling his eyes. “Would you cut that out? We’re friends. I just said that,” he grumbled, nudging the other man with one elbow.

“She just  _ threatened  _ to  _ shoot you,” _ the thief shot back. His hands shifted, and all of a sudden there was a knife in each of his hands—Alessandra already confiscated three of them, so she had no idea how many more were hiding on his person. “I’m happy to see that you’re connecting with old friends, Juno, but you’re not going to die from it on my watch.”

Alessandra sighed and made a show of holstering her blaster. Then she reached around to her knapsack and pulled out the other three knives, which she slid across the floor to the thief, an exaggerated peace offering. “Steel’s right. We need to get out of here. Without the theatrics, ideally.”

All five of the knives disappeared back into the thief’s clothing quicker than should’ve been possible, but he kept half-blocking Juno with his body as Alessandra approached, her hands in the air. That is, until Juno elbowed him in the hip, hard enough to shake his balance, and stepped in front of him with all the self-sacrificing bravado she’d come to expect. The thief retaliated with one hand on Juno’s shoulder, pulling him back again, until they were practically wrestling in front of Alessandra, so determined to defend each other that they nearly missed the door opening behind them.

And then there was another knife coming for Alessandra’s face. This crew really loved their knives, apparently. She would’ve been able to block it without a problem, but Juno intercepted the newcomer with a hand around her arm, just before she could get in stabbing range. “Stop, Vespa,” he barked. “She’s with us.”

“I am  _ not,”  _ Alessandra insisted.

The woman tugging her arm away from Juno was older than them both by a few decades, at least, though she could’ve just been tired. Really, bone-crushingly tired. Her gaunt face was shadowed by lime-green hair that had been slicked back at some point, but now bore the obvious marks of her fingers running through it over and over; her hard black eyes glared at Alessandra behind a pair of crooked green sunglasses. “You know Steel?” she demanded, voice as gruff and tense as she looked.

“Unfortunately.”

The woman—Vespa—turned around again before Juno could protest, beckoning Alessandra with one arthritic hand. “I’m taking your word on this, Juno. Guards are coming. We gotta go.”

Alessandra probably could’ve bluffed her way out if the guards had showed up—pretend to arrest the three of them or something—but there was no time to convince Juno’s crew to play along, if that would ever work at all. She followed Juno’s lead through two sets of doors, just as several sets of pounding footsteps approached from the far side of the vault. With one hand on her gun, she reached up to feel for the data drive in her pocket, and… “How the fuck did you—”

“And you had the nerve to call me a cat burglar,” the thief interrupted her.

Juno’s face warmed with silent laughter. And Alessandra was furious with them all, stealing her job out from under her and dragging her along when they were about to be caught, but seeing Juno smile was almost worth it. As she sprinted behind them, the thief took Juno’s hand and nearly tugged him off his feet, before they fell into step together, Juno battling as always to keep up with the long strides of everyone around him.

Even though she had studied the bank’s floorplan at length, Alessandra had to focus to keep their path straight in her mind. The thief—thieves, plural—led them down so many twisting corridors and switchbacks that she started to wonder if they were underground, since the building could only go on for so far, and things here seemed… murkier. From overhead, the dim lighting turned the thief’s silver earrings and Juno’s curly hair a sickly shade of green, almost as if they were trying to blend in with Vespa. Echoing footsteps followed them the whole way. They hadn’t actually seen the guards, but the sound was always there, seeming to approach from every direction and close in around them until they ran into a dead end, with only an old-fashioned vault door as a possible escape.

The thief attacked the door with nimble hands, testing and tugging at the groaning locks while Juno and Vespa turned to guard his back. Alessandra wasn’t keen on leaving herself open to attack from any side, so she took the lesser of four evils and put herself on the far side of Juno, gun aimed down the corner and ready to shoot wherever she had to. It quickly became obvious that garden-variety lockpicking wasn’t going to do the trick, and the thief pulled a number of inscrutable devices from his coat pockets, then began fidgeting with them until the door made a horrible metal-on-metal screech. At the same moment, their pursuers turned the corner, and Alessandra fought to keep from gasping.

The guards weren’t human. They probably weren’t alive, not that it was easy to tell under the shifting, twisting layers of… clockwork, as it appeared. There were only two, but each stood nearly twice Alessandra’s height, their long necks dipped down to fit into the span of the hallway, and they shambled forward on forelegs too long and wide for the rest of their bodies. Four grotesque copper horns protruded from each of their heads, and where living creatures might have had mouths, they each had a single mechanical eye.

“Fuck,” Juno whispered.

Alessandra took a moment to say goodbye to her current state of employment, and then she opened fire.

In an instant, the room was full of brilliant light, bouncing around too fast to follow, as Alessandra and Juno shot at the mechanical guards and realized, fast enough, that their fire was only deflected. She didn’t miss the way Juno shifted until he was pressed back-to-back with the thief, covering him from any stray laser bolts. But in that moment of lost focus, Vespa disappeared. “Shit,” hissed Alessandra, holstering her blaster and reaching for the massive knife strapped to her thigh. “I hope your friend didn’t just ditch us here, Steel.”

“She couldn’t have,” the thief grunted back. He was, evidently, not used to being contained by such frivolous structures as doors.

“Don’t worry about her.” Juno reached behind himself and into the thief’s pockets, where he pulled out something that looked like an ancient pocket watch, its glass face too scratched-up to read. “We might’ve been unprepared for you, Strong, but we still did our research. Now step back, I need room to throw this.”

Alessandra trusted his aim with a blaster, but his athleticism was more of a gamble, so she moved back toward the thief and watched as Juno tossed the watch in a dramatic arc toward the guards. It clattered to a stop between them, though they hardly seemed to notice it, and then several things happened fast enough to make Alessandra’s (very steady) head spin.

The monstrous guards collapsed, their spindly legs losing purchase as they crumpled down toward the pocket watch like—like magnets. It was a magnet. Later, Alessandra would be surprised at how easy that had been. In the next moment, Vespa materialized on top of them, a knife in each hand, and with immaculate aim, she drove the daggers into their shuddering metal eyes until their faces were shadowed with sparks. The guards didn’t stop struggling, apparently unfazed by the assault, but Vespa leapt away from them and rejoined the group without issue. Alessandra turned to find that the thief had carved away most of the vault door, and before she could look even look through it, she was half-pushed-half-dragged along with the rest of the group as they tumbled through the opening. And then they fell.

It couldn’t have been more than six feet, and they landed in what seemed to be a dumpster, but Alessandra still hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of her. Once her ears stopped ringing, she could hear Juno hacking up a lung, as usual, nearly covering up Vespa’s soft wheezing next to him. The thief was already on his feet and staring up at the hole he’d made in the wall, but when Alessandra looked up, it was gone. He glanced down, saw her staring, and gave her the kind of self-assured smirk that made her want to strangle him again. “Soldering plasma knife,” he explained. “I only had to pry the door open, and then it sealed behind us. We should be safe, for the time being.”

He gave Juno a hand up, and the four of them climbed out of the dumpster, shaking assorted trash from their clothes. Not an ideal situation—and Juno made his opinions known, as always—but Alessandra had seen worse, as the racing adrenaline in her veins reminded her. She turned around to take stock of the alley they were in, noting unlit buildings, rats clicking softly under piles of garbage, and the tang of smog hanging just above their heads. “This city is disgusting,” Vespa grumbled, voicing the thought that Alessandra kept to herself.

“Yeah, well, it hasn’t gotten us yet. Let’s get to somewhere safe,” Juno replied.

Alessandra didn’t mean to hug him, but apparently hearing that kind of confidence in his voice, or the comfort with these strangers, or  _ something…  _ she didn’t really want to analyze what it did to her head, not when she was busy lifting Juno off his feet and squeezing the air out of him. He yelped and struggled for a second before realizing that she wasn’t actively attacking him, and to her considerate surprise, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and gave her a couple tentative pats on the back. “You—uh, you okay there, Strong?”

“I thought you were dead,” she muttered. “After the Free Dome mess. I didn’t think there was any way you could get out of there alive, Juno, I thought I’d never see you again.”

This time, she felt Juno swallow awkwardly. “Yeah, y’know, I’m hard to kill. If you wanna thank anyone, these are the people.”

She set him down on his feet, a bit embarrassed by the impromptu show of affection, to see three more figures approaching from the end of the alleyway. If it weren’t for Rita’s unique silhouette, she would’ve gone on the defensive, but Alessandra found that she was incapable of  _ not  _ trusting Rita, so she took Juno’s relative ease at face value. “I see you’ve indoctrinated your secretary into your life of crime.”

“Oh, please. She has much more fun than I do.”

Alessandra rolled her eyes. “I’m glad to see that you’ve made friends, Steel, but I just blew my own job wide open for you, and you owe me an explanation.”

His mouth twitched, uncertain, until the thief sidled up next to him and draped one bejeweled arm over his shoulders, more protective than comforting. “Always gotta keep me on my toes, huh?”

“Juno.” He made eye contact for a split second, then looked away toward the trio approaching them, as if searching for permission. That was definitely new. “Start. Talking.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In all, it was an absolutely reckless plan. Alessandra didn’t say anything, but the look on her face was enough for Juno to huff and demand to know if she had any better ideas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for fairly graphic descriptions of poisoning, blood, adverse reactions to said poisoning, etc. And more mechanical security guard-monster things. Feel free to ask if you need any more specific information/warnings!

Alessandra “three days in a foxhole” Strong had a very loose definition of a safehouse, or so she thought, until she set foot in the decrepit office building where Juno’s new friends were hiding. It wasn’t necessarily unsafe, or even under-furnished, but it was the most drab-concrete-gray establishment she had ever seen. She could only pity the people who had actually worked there, once upon a time. The big man—this one even bigger than her—had pushed most of the desks up against the window, blocking most of the sunlight, so their meager bedrolls were lit only by flickering fluorescent bulbs. Alessandra tried not to think about whether the carpet was made more of dust or cockroach legs, as she sat down on a swiveling chair that emitted a dying groan every time she moved. “Alright. Who are all of you?”

She had demanded an explanation, or at least some introductions, as soon as they escaped from the bank, but again Juno had insisted that they weren’t safe to talk. Rita led them back to the safehouse, followed by the other two members of the crew, so Alessandra got a long minute to study them all. The big man, massive shoulders accentuated by a leather jacket so worn it barely had a color, had the kind of placidly threatening energy that screamed  _ Juno’s type, _ which Alessandra quickly confirmed when he looked Juno over for obvious injuries and staunchly ignored Juno’s stammering. She couldn’t really blame Juno, either. The big guy had the kind of warm brown skin and cold, stony face that got to Alessandra, too, even if she could hold herself together better than Juno could. She shook his hand when he offered it, which surprised her, but he seemed more straightforward than the rest of this group. “I am Jet Sikuliaq,” he announced. “And this is my co-conspirator, Rita.”

“She already knows me, Jet,” Rita stage-whispered. “Miss Strong is very nice. Much nicer than  _ Mista Steel.” _

“What’d I do?” whined Juno, who was currently stuck between two equally bland desks as he struggled to reach the blinds.

Rita rolled her eyes fondly. “Anyway. It’s nice to see you, Alessandra. I hope Mista Thief Man didn’t rough ya up too bad.”

“Is… is that actually what you call him, or—?”

Jet, who was still looming protectively despite Rita’s reassurances, interjected. “He is understandably particular about the people who know his name, so we generally allow him to introduce himself.”

If Alessandra didn’t know better, she might’ve expected the thief to take that opportunity, but when she turned to look at him, he only looked her up and down with eyes narrowed and lips pressed together tightly. It was the kind of appraisal that made her skin crawl—which wasn’t easy to do, if she said so herself. She returned the look with an equally suspicious glare. “He already introduced himself with a few stabbing attempts, which seems par for the course. Who’s your intrepid leader, then?”

The woman in question was already on her way over, after extracting a sulking Juno from his self-imposed desk prison. She had commanded at least a third of Alessandra’s attention from the moment she stepped into the light in the grimy alley; it was hard to keep from staring at her brilliant hair and bombshell figure, and that was before Alessandra could even parse how many explosives were attached to her body in some way or another. Only half of her face was visible, but that was enough to see the way her crow’s feet crinkled as she reached out her hand to shake Alessandra’s. Her eye was warm enough to fall into, her lips full enough to intoxicate, her smile so genuine it would make anyone’s chest flutter. “Buddy Aurinko,” she said, and—her voice was honeyed whiskey, and Alessandra might have lost her mind. “I hear you’re a friend of Juno’s, dear?”

“Strong,” she managed. “Alessandra. Uh. Alessandra Strong, Private Investigator. Is my name.” To her immense chagrin, she could hear Juno snickering behind her.

“Ah, then that explains quite a bit.” Buddy’s eye hardened, almost imperceptibly, but she still clasped Alessandra’s hand gently until Alessandra realized that she was hanging on to the handshake for dear life. “Your employers knew they were about to be robbed, so they hired you, only for you to find yourself on the wrong end of an old friend’s gun?”

“Yes ma’am,” Alessandra replied, stifling the urge to salute. Or fall to her knees. Buddy Aurinko was  _ something else.  _ “I—I trust Juno’s judgment, for the most part, even if he is a  _ fucking idiot  _ sometimes.” She raised her voice to make sure that he heard, even though he’d made his way over to them by now and was standing next to Buddy with his arms crossed and his face screwed into a pout. “So I would really appreciate some reassurance that I didn’t just sell out my employer without a good reason.”

Buddy tipped her head to one side, and the curtain of her hair swayed a bit, revealing a tiny strip of shrunken, ash-gray skin. Then she straightened again, and her mask of perfection was back in place. “And I would appreciate some reassurance that you did, in fact, sell out your employer, and that you don’t intend to turn us in as soon as we let our guard down.”

Juno started to protest for her, though it seemed more like he was just pissed that Buddy didn’t have enough faith in his choice of friends, and Alessandra was more flattered than she let on as she interrupted him. “I’m not sure what you need me to explain. Steel and I have a, uh, history, so I believed him when he said he was stealing from my employers for a reason. On the other hand, I’m not usually one to jump ship so quickly, but their security was just  _ ridiculous.  _ Like, it’s good, but I was convinced that I’d take one wrong step and get blown a mile into space the whole time.” She turned and jabbed a finger in the thief’s direction. “Not to mention that guy putting up the nastiest fight I’ve ever seen, and I  _ am  _ a combat veteran.”

If it were possible, the thief’s eyes went even colder. “Solar?” She nodded, and his brow furrowed farther. “Where?”

“Tau Ceti, mostly.”

The thief’s face relaxed incrementally, and he returned to Juno’s side without sparing her any more than a suspicious glance. “Anyway,” sighed Alessandra, “I assume that you’re stealing data for some life-altering, self-sacrificial cause, and that you all plan to keep me in suspense until I’m just about to give up and then drop some big surprise detail to reel me back in.”

“Hey,” Juno grumbled.

Buddy ignored him. “Miss Strong, have you ever had the chance to visit the Cerberus Province?”

“Never,” she replied. “Thank goodness.”

From her perch on top of a dilapidated desk, Vespa snorted. “Keep it that way.”

“In the Cerberus Province,” Buddy continued, ignoring her wife, “thousands of Martian citizens currently live—if you could call it that—in a perpetual state of indentured servitude. Without a dome, they rely on blood filtration to survive the radiation poisoning, and so the shadier of the Martian elite make a pretty penny selling them their own lives until they wither away into nothing, all the while promising them some impossible chance of escape.”

Alessandra had seen worse, had  _ known  _ worse, but it stung to know that something like this was happening so close to Hyperion City without her knowledge. “I always—I thought no one lived in the Cerberus Province.”

“So did I,” grunted Juno. “You don’t want to see ‘em, trust me.”

Buddy pressed her lips together, obviously done with the interruptions. “We have the means to procure the curemother, as they call it, on which the blood filtration is based, but we don’t know what to do with it once we have it. Your employers, Miss Strong, developed the model of bracelet used by most of the… businesses in the Cerberus Province. We access the designs, we make our own bracelets, and we can start diverting the flow of human traffic, as it were, from those who would take advantage of them and into our own hands.”

“And how do I know you’re not planning to do the same thing?”  _ You’re criminals, after all, _ she wants to say. She knows—she knows Juno wouldn’t. Rita wouldn’t. But the rest of them?

Before her train of thought can go on, Vespa grimaced and stood up from the desk, then rolled up one sleeve to reveal a clunky, scratched-up bracelet with a barely-decipherable screen blinking some random numbers and her name.  _ Vespa I.  _ Alessandra’s breath caught in her chest, and she looked up to meet Vespa’s eyes through her green glasses. “Got it,” she replied, struggling to keep the squeak of embarrassment out of her voice.

“The other problem,” the thief cut in, to her surprise, “you’re probably aware of by now. The company micro-manages every point of entry on the entire planet. Even without the plans, our group flies far too many red flags to leave unquestioned, and you will have a particularly hard time escaping since they already have all of your information.”

That thought had been bouncing around in the back of Alessandra’s head, but she grimaced as it came to fruition under Buddy’s guidance. “Yeah. Shoulda seen that one coming.”

“Regardless of your motives, we wouldn’t leave a friend of Juno’s here to be horrifically murdered.” Buddy sounded almost irritated at the thief interrupting her monologue.

Not that it deterred him in the slightest. “Probably.”

“Please be nice, Mista N—Gl—uhm, I forget what name you’re usin’ on this one,” Rita mumbled, hovering somewhere around the thief’s elbow. Alessandra tried not to be irritated by their apparent friendship; she had liked Rita a lot when they met before, and she would normally have trusted her to be more wary of uncomfortably sinuous interplanetary criminals.

The look on the thief’s face was as close to an eye-roll as he could manage without actually taking his eyes off of Alessandra, though his smile was fond as he replied. “That’s alright, Rita. You, detective, may call me Nureyev.”

As smooth a name as she would expect, and definitely fake. “Charmed.”

They continued to watch each other with concealed malice until Buddy cleared her throat and stood from the desk where she’d been reclining. “If you two are done posturing, can we outline our plan, please?”

Alessandra conceded—Buddy was the kind of woman she felt an instinctive need to obey—and after another moment, the thief blew a wisp of hair out of his eyes and turned to her as well. From the sound of it, their plan was just to brute-force their way back to their ship and then through the atmosphere. The planet wasn’t too fiercely guarded from the outside, so they didn’t have to worry about lasers from the sky smiting them as they flew off, but the lax security in the air was balanced by an intricate network of walls and tunnels and traps surrounding the entire city. To get to their ship, they had to travel beneath the facility they’d just left, then steal a car (not that Buddy would say so in as many words) and hope that no one caught them before they traveled the dozen-or-so miles into the barren desert to find their ship. Their car—something about a gemstone?—was on standby if needed, but apparently it would attract too much attention as a first resort.

In all, it was an absolutely reckless plan. Alessandra didn’t say anything, but the look on her face was enough for Juno to huff and demand to know if she had any better ideas.

“No, Steel, they—the people hiring me were pretty cryptic about the whole situation here, probably because they knew the risk of something like this happening,” she grumbled.

The rest of the crew ignored them as Rita projected a map of the tunnels from her comms. “We have the layout of the maze,” she explained, standing on her tiptoes to trace their path with one pink-dusted finger. “But we have no idea what’s down there. Well, other than those things you guys saw earlier. So we know their style, I guess, but it could be anything. Like—like an  _ ostrich!  _ Have you ever heard of ostriches, Mista Steel? They talked about them on this one nature program I saw once, it was—it was that new Planet Earth 16, they did a really good job with robo-Attenborough—”

“Thank you, Rita,” Vespa interrupted. Her voice was sharp, but Rita didn’t seem upset; more likely that was just how Vespa sounded all the time. “Ideally, we all stick together once we get down there, but if they know we’re trying to get out, they’ll do everything they can to split us up.”

Buddy looked her over with a wry smile. “You know I won’t let that happen, dear.” Then she turned back to the rest of the group, face hardening. “As for the rest of you, just… try not to die, alright?” With that, she stood again, plucking a tommy gun from somewhere behind a desk and, with a snakelike maneuver, slipped the whole thing effortlessly into her dress. Alessandra hadn’t seen the gun before, and she couldn’t make out its shape now; she wasn’t sure which fact scared her more. Then Buddy turned, reached out to grasp Vespa’s hand, and headed for the door.

“Wait, we’re going  _ now?”  _ Alessandra hissed, sticking close to Juno and Rita.

“They know we’re on the planet,” Nureyev explained, as if Alessandra was demanding to be led along by the hand like a child. “If we don’t go now, our escape becomes more deadly with every minute we waste. No one was hurt the first time around, so we push onward.”

Biting down another protest, Alessandra fell into step with the rest of the group, jogging down the stairs and out of the decrepit office building. “Your boyfriend is an ass,” she muttered to Juno, low enough that Nureyev couldn’t hear.

To her immense surprise, Juno just flushed bright red and avoided her stare.

“Are you kidding me, Steel? I didn’t know you were  _ capable _ of repressing—”

Rita cleared her throat. “It’s not worth your time, Miss Strong. They’re figuring it out.”

“I really dodged that bullet, huh,” Alessandra mumbled, far too quiet for Juno or Rita to hear.

They made it to the tunnels without issue, slipping through alleyways and between skyscrapers as distant stars winked in and out of view between the hazy clouds overhead. It was too easy to break into the tunnels, too easy to enfold themselves in the stifling darkness that wound below the false sterility they’d escaped hours before. A few hundred meters into the cloying shadows, something above them started to hum, and running lights flickered on at ankle height, lighting up the grimy steel of the tunnel walls in sodium orange.

Everyone froze, but again, nothing happened.

Vespa took point, clearly slipping into some kind of instinct that made the hairs on the back of Alessandra’s neck stand up. She wasn’t as good as estimating these things as she used to be, but she figured they walked for another mile and a half when things started to go very wrong.

Juno stopped so abruptly that Nureyev walked into him, and the two stumbled into the wall of the tunnel. As her reflexes kicked in, Alessandra watched Juno throw his hand out to catch his fall, and a tiny panel opened in the sheer steel, revealing a plate of tiny glass spikes that shifted to fill the space until they were embedded in Juno’s palm. He hissed a curse and ripped his hand back, even as his shoulder slammed into the wall, but it was too late to avoid the crushed glass ground into his hand.

“Shit,” he grumbled, shaking off Nureyev’s concerned hands and pushing himself away from the wall. Buddy and Vespa had both turned to see what was going on, but Jet was frozen in place, staring down the tunnel toward a slow, blinking light that had gripped Alessandra’s attention, too.

“That looks nasty, but we need to keep going, my dear detective,” murmured Nureyev, petting Juno’s un-bloodied arm. “I have a feeling that—”

He was cut off by a horrendous shriek from down the tunnel, as the blinking light turned from a soft yellow to a violently flashing white. Alessandra tried to look at it, to  _ comprehend  _ it, but all she could see was the flash—nothing—flash,  _ screaming,  _ horrible sounds—nothing. “Run,” Jet roared, slinging Rita over his shoulders fireman-style and taking off in what looked like a practiced maneuver. Then the light was advancing on them, and Alessandra lost track of everything that wasn’t directly in front of her.

A flash: Juno holding his hand close to his chest as his body buckled in pain, blood shining wet and viscous against his dark skin.

A flash: Nureyev holding what she’d assumed to be a normal watch up to his mouth, screaming something about Ruby and  _ NOW. _

A flash: empty space where Juno’s head had been.

A flash, as she looked down: Juno curled on the floor, limbs locked in impossible angles.

A flash: steel and tempered glass towering over them, shimmering with light and color and sound so powerful Alessandra could  _ see  _ it, moving and rushing through shapes that didn’t make sense, except that there was a mouth and it would be on them in an instant if she didn’t do something.

The light and the roar, flashing like a strobe light, were maybe the most disorienting thing Alessandra had ever dealt with, but not by much. She  _ could  _ do something. So she bent down just long enough to throw Juno over her shoulders, mirroring Jet’s movements before, and her eyes met Nureyev’s in the final flash before they dodged to either side of the shrieking horror and sprinted away. In his panicked face, raw and open for a thief, she saw nothing but the bone-deep need to get Juno out alive.

A crash rang out behind them, as the rushing— _ thing _ —slammed into the tunnel wall. Alessandra didn’t want to find out how fast it could turn around.

“The car’s on her way,” Nureyev panted, his footsteps close on her heels. “We just—have to—find a way out.”

They had no idea where the rest of the group had gone, and within a couple of turns Alessandra was starting to wonder if they were even heading out of the city anymore. It wasn’t like her to get so disoriented, which was concerning. But then Nureyev jerked her to a stop with one hand on her Juno-less shoulder, and when she turned, he was cutting through the padlock on a hatch in the ceiling. “This is where Ruby’s signal led me,” he explained as he pulled himself out of the tunnel and then turned to help Alessandra get Juno out.

He was right about the car—it was far too tacky to go unnoticed. Even in the dark, the lime-green paint seared her eyes. She wasn’t going to hold a grudge against the car that got her out of those damn tunnels, though, so when Nureyev slid into the driver’s seat and popped a hatch to the back of the car, she followed his lead without question.

At last, she could set Juno down and grab his bleeding hand, in the futile hope of figuring out what the hell had gone so wrong, but she couldn’t keep a hold on him. As they were running, she had felt his legs locking and kicking against her chest, but now that she could see, it was… worse. His jaw was clamped shut, as hard as he tried to yell, and his arms twitched and spasmed out of his control as his back arched so far that Alessandra feared for his spine. (More than she usually did, with that slouch.) She didn’t want to risk hurting him by trying to restrain him, but she had no idea what else to do, she didn’t—she couldn’t—nothing about this job said  _ bring a first aid kit, your old friend is gonna show up and get horribly poisoned— _

Nureyev jerked the car around a sudden turn, and she met his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Can you get a bit of that glass from his hand? Carefully? Ruby should be able to… identify it.”

She nodded and took the pair of forceps that the car presented, not questioning the maybe-sentient car and its absurdly helpful abilities. It took another minute to grip Juno’s wrist for long enough to snag a piece of glass, and it tore his skin again on the way out, but at this point that seemed the least of their worries. The car offered a test tube that sucked the glass and forceps both into its depths, leaving Alessandra and Nureyev to catch their breath while indecipherable symbols flashed across the dashboard.

Alessandra looked up again, narrowly avoiding Juno’s fist as his arm hyperflexed until she was sure he’d break something. Though Nureyev was focused on his haphazard driving, he would glance at the mirror every few seconds, his eyes drawn to Juno too hard to resist. His lips were drawn tight and expressionless, but tears streamed down his cheeks. “How far from the ship are we?” Alessandra prompted, just trying to draw his attention so he wouldn’t panic before they got there.

“Ten minutes. Maybe. If Ruby can figure out what’s wrong, she should—there should be—Juno’s seen worse than this.”

“I know,” she murmured. The car drowned her out with an urgent whistle, and then a syringe popped out of the wall without warning, jabbing around until it found Juno’s shoulder and injected him with—well, Alessandra didn’t want to know. In front of her, the dashboard flashed orange and then green again, reading:  _ Concentrated tetanospasmin isolated. Administering first aid protocol.  _ “I know,” Alessandra repeated, as she understood, all of a sudden, that there was nothing this thief wouldn’t do for Juno Steel.

Hopefully, that would be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M SO FUCKIN SORRY Y'ALL. I posted the first chapter in... April?? and was like "yes, I'm holding myself accountable, this is gonna be updated Soon and finished Fast cuz I'm Passionate about this idea." And then finals hit me like a fucking freight train, and then I graduated, and then I had to deal with losing all the structure and pre-determined lifestyle of school and it was Pretty Damn Rough, and my summer internship keeps me pretty busy. Oh, and I got W A Y into The Adventure Zone, listened to it all v fast, cried harder than I've ever cried in my damn life, and hyperfixated, so I've just been reading a lot of fic and not writing much. (Magnus Archives happened, too, but apparently I have to pace myself with being Way Totally Obsessed with things cuz it didn't hit me quite as hard.)
> 
> But, yeah, I did what I came here to do, I gave Juno Steel tetanus for no fucking reason, and now Alessandra and Peter get to be Angst Friends while he recovers. As for some of the made-up stuff in this chapter: I just looked at a Wikipedia list of planets near our solar system for where Alessandra might have fought, and I imagine there are all kinds of bioweapons that far in the future and that taking the toxin out of tetanus spores and making it super strong and fast-acting is, like, feasible. (Shoutout to the Penumbra Creators discord for helping me choose ways to poison Juno lmao)
> 
> comments/kudos/attention on [tumblr](alderations.tumblr.com) always make me happy!!!


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